When comparing Preact vs Rivets, the Slant community recommends Rivets for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript libraries for building a UI?” Rivets is ranked 6th while Preact is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Rivets is:
Rivets takes DOM element as input, which has special attributes prefixed with 'rv-'. So you may declare DOM element in whatever language you like, even in HTML.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
The size when gzipped is only 3kb, and performance is as good as (or even faster than) React itself.
Pro Same API as react
Avoids having to learn an entire new paradigm, and makes it easy to switch between the two libraries later on.
Pro Lots of examples and libraries
They have a bunch of examples and addon libraries.
Pro Awesome CLI
Preact CLI gives you a perfect scoring PWA out-of-the-box with no configuration.
Pro Doesn't require special DOM declaration syntax like JSX
Rivets takes DOM element as input, which has special attributes prefixed with 'rv-'. So you may declare DOM element in whatever language you like, even in HTML.
Cons
Con Difficult to learn
You need to be good in React JS first to learn Preact. Documentation is not rich. And some of the examples given on site are not working. Developers are not much active on Stack Overflow as well.
Con Seems to be abandoned
No new commits have been pushed since March 2015.